Seeing Myanmar From the Inside Out
Twenty-seven locally led research projects explore how digital technologies are reshaping life amid conflict and repression in Myanmar.
What does digital life look like in a country where the internet can be a lifeline, a battleground, a classroom, a source of income — but also a source of grave danger?
Since Myanmar’s 2021 military coup, conflict has spread, institutions have fractured, and millions of lives have been disrupted. At the same time, digital technologies increasingly shape how people navigate profound political, social and economic change. They create new possibilities, but also new risks.
How do you begin to understand all of that? One answer is to support people who know Myanmar from the inside to ask the questions they see emerging around them.
That was the idea behind Myanmar Digital Research.
Over three years, emerging researchers in Myanmar and the diaspora investigated questions arising from their rapidly changing society. Most explored its digital dimensions, from education and misinformation to gender-based violence, financial systems and new forms of crime.
These researchers led 27 remarkably varied projects. Read their published studies together, and you start to see a bigger picture.
Seeing a bigger picture
Consider Myanmar’s place in the global scam economy. Three research teams approached it from different directions. One mapped the sprawling industry and the scam compounds at its centre. Another investigated how recruiters use social media to lure workers from across Asia and Africa. A third examined digital scams targeting people in Myanmar itself.
Together, those three scam-sector studies reveal something larger: a transnational system connecting organized crime, human trafficking, technology platforms, economic desperation and victims around the world.
Other researchers explored very different aspects of life in post-coup Myanmar. They examined how people use digital tools to resist repression, maintain access to education, navigate financial restrictions and build new forms of community and connection. The research captures how deeply digital technologies have become woven into everyday life — and into the ways people adapt to uncertainty and change.
Locally led, by design
That locally rooted approach is central to SecDev’s work to strengthen digital resilience. We believe people closest to digital challenges should help define the questions, lead the research and shape the responses.
Taken together, these studies offer a rich body of knowledge about a country undergoing extraordinary change. They also show what’s possible when emerging researchers have the support, tools and opportunity to investigate what matters in their own communities.
The SecDev Foundation convened Myanmar Digital Research in partnership with Knowledge for Democracy Myanmar, with support from Canada’s International Development Research Centre and Global Affairs Canada.
